Close and Slow Pt.8

A Weekly Appreciation of Poetry

Many of us feel a bit inadequate when it comes to reading poetry, perhaps suspecting that there is some higher learning or personal initiation required to appreciate verse. ‘Close and Slow’ is a regular feature here on ‘New Grub Street’ providing some pointers as to how to read and enjoy poetry, taking an individual poem for each post and highlighting some ways in which it can be read. I trust that these articles might open poetry to those keen to read it but a little overwhelmed- and provide a mustering point for those of us already convinced of the centrality of poetry to life. Previous editions of ‘Close and Slow’ can be read here.

‘End of Winter’ by Louise Glück

Louise Glück was, and remains, one of the most important poetic voices in twentieth-century literature. A Nobel laureate, her work is marked by steady attentiveness to her inner and outer worlds, and a kind of delicate robustness of language which is at once tender, troubling and innately visceral. Daniel Morris has described Glück’s work as,

Blurring the borders between modernist and contemporary styles, her poetry has been judged individualistic and universal, ordinary and oracular, momentary and mythic, tragic and comic.

‘End of Winter’ is an excellent example of Glück’s poetic skill, her innate humanity, and the way in which she can weave major themes and issues into verse which is deceptively simple in tone and language.

Week by week in ‘Close and Slow’, we have been engaging in four activities that help us to approach each poem, and we will adopt it again this week as a helpful way in to ‘End of Winter’:

1. Listen to the voice of the poem

2. Put form first

3. Identify clear themes

4. Piece it all together

Listen to the voice of the poem

Hurry is the enemy of appreciating poetry, and a thirst to immediately ‘understand’ or ‘master’ a piece of verse often diminishes the blessing that is bestowed on ‘close and slow’ engagement. Taking time to allow a poem to breathe, to independently expand in our consciousness and affections, is one of the best ways of absorbing its ‘meaning’ and enjoying the effect it is designed to have on us. In this respect, poetry is a sensory experience before it is intellectual, it is a form of communication before it should be an object of study.

Taking time to ‘listen’ is, therefore, paramount. As a poet, Glück did not enjoy reading her poetry aloud, and held that communication was best realised from the page to the eyes and mind,

I think the poem is a communication between a mouth and an ear—not an actual mouth and an actual ear, but a mind that sends a message and a mind that receives it. For me, the aural experience of a poem is transmitted visually. I hear with my eyes and dislike reading aloud and (except on very rare occasions) being read to. The poem becomes, when read aloud, a much simpler, sequential shape: the web becomes a one-way street.

This plea on the part of the poet gives us a good key about how to read ‘End of Winter’. When Glück composed this piece, she intended it to work as an inwardly read poem, and adopting the rules of that particular discipline greatly helps us to understand what it says. In any case, repeated readings (whether silent or audible) will bring the poem to a sharper definition.

Put form first

Sometimes poetic form is easy to identify, particularly in works which conform to specific rules. If a poem has a straightforward rhyme scheme or its rhythm is regular, or if it can be identified as a sonnet or a sestina etc., then we can easily piece together how the poet is communicating. In much Modernist and contemporary poetry these kinds of ‘rules’ are set aside, or are more difficult to identify that in more traditional verse. This does not mean, however, that there are not formal features to be noted, or that deliberate devices have not been used to convey meaning.

The poetry of Louis Glück is exquisitely composed and finely worked. Taking time to notice the care with which ‘End of Winter’ is composed will greatly help us when we come to consider the poem’s ‘meaning’.

The first thing we can notice is how important the shape and sound of words are to Glück, and the opening three lines betray this in a particularly powerful way,

‘End of Winter’ opens with quite persistent alliteration. We can trace ‘bird’ through ‘black boughs’ and terminate these sounds in the repetition of the word ‘born’ in line three. The letter ‘B’ in English is technically known as a ‘bilabial plosive’, that is it requires our lips to press together before air is released to make the sound. Although Glück is not a fan of poetry read aloud, the opening lines of ‘End of Winter’ give a perpetual sense of emergence, the bird, the boughs, the birth, and this falls in line with the overall purpose of the poem, as we will see later. Even if merely taken on the page, as one mind sending a message to another, this repeated letter draws our attention and ties these three lines together in some thematic way.

We might also note the combination of the words ‘a bird calls/waking solitary’. The first three words carry one syllable, the fourth has two syllables, and the fifth carries four syllables. Again, this grants us a sense of emergence, of the opening out of the bird song across the first stanza.

We can also note the subtle use of rhyme that Glück employs,

In the first quote, Glück plays with the ‘ing’ ending of each word to emphasise the lack of self-consciousness on the part of the one addressed, with the repetition of anything proving particularly important for what the poem means.

In the second quote we can note how ‘cry’ catches ‘only’, which then leads us into the repeated ‘goodbye’, the latter word being at the heart of what Glück is communicating.

We could note many more formal features here, but those highlighted will hopefully provide my readers with a way of engaging with the finer details of the poem for their own profit.

Identify clear themes

Last week we witnessed how powerful autobiographical poetry can be, particularly when dealing with trauma. Such poetry, while presenting its challenges, at least gives us a straight deal - the ‘I’ is the same person as the poet. However, assuming that the ‘I’ is always referring to the person who has penned the poem can lead us to significant difficulties in interpretation.

Louise Glück was particularly masterful in using ‘persona’ in her poetry to convey meaning. Daniel Morris offers us a good interpretation of how persona works for her, and it is helpful to quote it here (I will unpack some of its meaning shortly):

A postconfessional autobiographer, she [Glück] attempts to translate the meaning of her personal experience into a narrative of general consequence, by transforming liminal or trying episodes of her life into commonly known mythic structures that merge (or sometimes contrast) familial conflicts with the narrative canon.

What Morris is saying here is that Glück is given to telling her own story in a poem, but often through the filter of myths or commonly known narratives within the broader culture. This device allows her to tell the truth but, in Emily Dickinson’s phrase, to tell it ‘slant’. On the one hand this protects the poet from explode too much that is purely individual, but it also brings the readers into a wider story that is more universal.

When reading poetry, then, we should be careful not to always take the ‘I’ as ‘I’. Bearing this in mind we can reread ‘End of Winter’, seeking to discern ‘who’ is ‘speaking’ here:

The first filter we might want to apply here is maternal, and this was how I read the poem on my first exposure to it. Under this reading we have a mother describing how she births her child, how her needs become secondary to those of her infant, and how parenting is a long exercise in bidding one’s child goodbye as they get older. This makes for a very poignant reading experience, and it is worth sitting with the poem under this lens for as long as we can bear it. The farewell of a parent to a child over a lifetime, the lingering notes of ‘goodbye’ forming ‘the one continuous line/that binds us to each other’ lifts us into a philosophical and existential realm and hems our most basic relationships with a lot of emotion. We might identify these kinds of feelings to those Christopher Nolan explored in Interstellar, where the character Cooper tells his daughter that ‘once you’re a parent, you’re a ghost of your children’s future’.

But what of Glück’s use of myth or commonly shared narratives as a way of exploring these kinds of emotions? This question can help us to apply another filter to the ‘I’ of the poem - what if it is God? Once you’ve recovered from this abrupt change of focus, try reading the poem in this way now,

This transforms the poem and is most likely in line with the themes that the poet wants to explore. This is not to deny the parental emphasis of the piece, nor to suggest that Glück is refusing to channel her own maternal emotions into the writing - but God is the best fit here.

This links us back to the title of the poem, ‘End of Winter’, where irrepressible life bursts from the otherwise barren landscape (the ‘black boughs’). Here God observes the exuberant and Spring-like emergence of humanity, subjugates his own griefs in favour of the pleasure of his creatures, and watches with sadness at the trajectory that humans will take. Their ‘vivacity’ is unthinking and, before the Fall, they cannot imagine life separated from God - ‘never imagining the sound of my voice/as anything but part of you’. Now, in their present reality, God notes that his voice won’t be heard by them in ‘the other world’ but will only be discerned by,

persistent echoing
in all sound that means goodbye, goodbye

This resonant and barely discerned farewell will be humanity’s last living link to the paternal God who gave them life and watched them fall, and yet the relationship lingers in the word ‘goodbye’, meaning God and humans are still bound to one another.

Piece it all together

We have worked hard to get to this point, and if you are still with me in this post - well done! I hope that you can see that our labours with Glück’s work is richly rewarded. We are left with a poem which sounds notes and touches nerves that we do not commonly visit. The ennui of parental love is transposed into the shared narrative of human beings adrift from their Creator, and thus our domestic heartaches are transfigured into a register that lends them greater weight.

We can thus do two things with the poem, one relational and the other philosophical:

Relationally, this fleeting poem, this short literary moment, plugs us into the steady loss that relationship with others always entails. We might take the poem as a way to relate to our own children and the passage of time, or to our own parents (whether present or gone from us). The resonating ‘goodbye’ of the poem rings through some of our deepest connections with other human beings, so that even the exclusive closeness of mother and child is ultimately disrupted and changed as time passes. This is a big thought and, for me at least, engenders very profound and visceral emotions. It is good to sit with such things and allow them to sink in.

Philosophically, we can allow the poem to speak to the big themes about humanity and divinity. As a Christian, I find this poem stimulating. Its theological framework about Creation and Fall is somewhat different from my own, but the poem courageously articulates the ache of human existence, the sense that our wilful denial of consequence has severed us from relating to God. With my own theology, I want to swing that arch back into the theme of redemption and restoration, but even just absorbing the sadness of the ‘goodbye, goodbye’ makes me grateful for Glück’s keen poetic eye.

For those who do not share my beliefs (and Louise Glück stands with you here) this poem helps us to parse the exile that echoes in our souls, it allows us space to reckon with the wreckage of our lives and of our world, and to think about why things are the way they are, and perhaps even to own up to the resonances of God that our conscience and cosmos still entertains. Who knows where such thoughts might lead you!

Photo credit: Gerard Malanga - poetrycenter.org. Cropped and retouched. Public domain.